Fuck you in the arse and the eye

In praise of Oliver Kamm

I don’t like Oliver Kamm very much. I think he’s a smug bore, that he’s approximately 10% as clever as he believes himself to be, and that he promotes a particularly noxious variety of Decent-ism.

However, even allowing for the proposition that Oliver Kamm is a cunt, then Neil Clark is a grotesque Frankenstein-esque creation sewn together from the rotting, diseased organs of dead AIDS-ridden prostitutes. He’s a fan of the late, lamented Slobodan Milosovic, and indeed of Greater Serbia in general, which would tend to raise alarm bells but doesn’t make him inherently evil.

No, Mr Clark is inherently evil because he tried to sue Oliver Kamm for libel, after Mr Kamm suggested that one of Mr Clark’s book reviews was so badly written and point-missing that it was debatable whether he’d even read the book. Rather than, say, calling Mr Kamm a cunt, he started to fire off writs, bringing the first reported UK libel action against a blogger.

This would not have been a good precedent for free speech. Luckily, being rich, well-connected and stubborn, Mr Kamm was able to hire and brief sufficiently competent lawyers that Mr Clark was scared enough to drop the case and flee, hopefully deterring others from following suit. I also approve of Mr Kamm’s conjecture that “I consider it wrong in principle and self-defeating … to threaten legal action against a blogger”.

In blog-libel-related news, it has now been established in the High Court that NuLab party hack and tedious blogger Phil Dilks did not kick a teenage girl in the arse for mocking him on the campaign trail. The case has also definitively established that Mr Dilks is a litigious scumbag, as with anyone else ever to have brought a libel case rather than merely telling their critics to fuck off – but presumably he feels it’s better to be a proven litigious scumbag than a wrongly accused girl-kicker. And he’s certainly not as bad as Neil Clark.

2 thoughts on “In praise of Oliver Kamm”

[…] So Ms X joins Neil Clark and Phil Dilks in the PDF official “I’m going to thue and thue til I’m thick, becauthe you’re a nathty man and I don’t like you” thatheth. And Steve Adeleke wins an official PDF apology. Mate, if you put up with Ms X even for long enough to get her up the duff and run away, you don’t need random people on the Internet slating you as well… Filed under Miscellany [link] […]

[…] I’m no fan of Mr Kamm, but he did well in fighting Mr Clark’s libel suit last year. For those who frankly can’t be arsed, Mr Kamm suggested that Mr Clark’s book review was crap and questioned whether Mr Clark had read the book in question. Anyone who sues for libel in such a situation thoroughly deserves horsewhipped, to use some Scottish idiom. […]